REVIEWS; Simple Symbols, Complex Stories

By Helen A. Harrison

Published: December 19, 2004

Ms. Brody-Lederman, who won the top award in last year's annual members' exhibition at Guild Hall, has invented a personal code to express her ideas about life and her own experience of it. Her paradoxical aim is to communicate what she describes as ''complex psychological content'' by means of private cryptography. The symbols in her mixed-media paintings are simple, direct and familiar, but their meanings are oblique and obscure.

Using a multilayered interplay of words and images, Ms. Brody-Lederman fashions a kind of illustrated serial story, in which characters and themes recur as they would in successive episodes of, say, ''The Perils of Pauline.'' Although there is plenty of humor to leaven the mix, much of the narrative is about peril -- not the physical kind, but the emotional foreboding caused by things that loom larger in the imagination than they do in reality.

A lot of those things, and the words or phrases that go with them, are taken out of context, which makes them more confusing but no less resonant. They have the hallucinatory quality of memory fragments that persistently nudge one's consciousness but refuse to gel into coherent recollections.

Back and back again come the barking dog, the rowboat, the empty chair, the solitary tree, all floating around with scraps of overheard conversation and diary excerpts. None of it makes sense on its own, but it becomes significant by virtue of its recurrence and persistence over time.

Thus the individual works are less compelling than a gallery full of them, where the viewer can follow the way Ms. Brody-Lederman perceives and processes such disparate data as, for example, the black birds, chains and crudely lettered clich?in ''Missing Links When Words Fail,'' or the boat, tree and chained balloon in ''Role Call,'' the show's title piece. That painting's written reference to ''learning the ropes'' is one of the many clues to deciphering Ms. Brody-Lederman's message.

With more than 60 examples, this show surveys Mr. Hoie's career as an illustrator who honed his observational skills by sketching fellow soldiers in World War II. His facility with the difficult watercolor medium was evident early on, and one of the show's many delights is the variety, subtlety and imagination with which he uses it.

His impressions of a harbor at Martha's Vineyard and a Bermuda cove, both dating from the 1950's, occupy one end of a technical spectrum that ranges from sketchy spontaneity to the understated refinement of his views of East Hampton landmarks in winter, painted in 2002.

A native of Norway, Mr. Hoie, who immigrated to the United States at age 12, comes from a seafaring family. As a young man, he served in the Merchant Marine.

While it is too much of a stretch to suggest that his love of the sea led him to favor watercolors, there is no question that his experiences as a mariner made a positive contribution to his art. He has a special gift for conveying the mysterious character of the ocean, which supports floating objects on its surface and extends to unknown depths below.

Among his best-known works is a long series of variations on the theme of whaling, including illustrations for Melville's ''Moby-Dick'' and a story of Mr. Hoie's own invention, ''The Log of the Whaler Helena.'' Based on actual 19th-century ship's logs, the journal records an imaginary two-year voyage from Sag Harbor to the South Seas, using vivid images of the hunters and their quarry to bring the chronicle to life.

In the past few years the Parrish has made some significant additions to its collections. This show, which also includes earlier acquisitions, illustrates how the newly acquired material fits into the museum's holdings of 19th- and 20th-century American art, especially although not exclusively by artists associated with eastern Long Island.

The William Merritt Chase collection has been enriched by Chase's 1912 self-portrait, which was recently sold, amid much controversy, by the Rogers Memorial Library. It is on long-term loan to the Parrish from the private collector who bought it. Surrounded by other Chase paintings and documents, it is a fitting complement to the more than 40 Chases the museum owns, especially if the loan eventually becomes a gift.

Charlotte Park's ''No.12,'' a shimmering 1952 abstraction, pairs nicely with a painting by her husband, James Brooks, already in the collection. Norman Bluhm's ''Waterloo'' is an outstanding example of the exuberant gestural style he perfected in the 1960's, and Herman Cherry's ''Throb,'' a 1986 canvas that pulsates with color, represents the artist at the peak of his career.

One of Lynda Benglis's richly textured untitled wax pieces from 1971, an important 1953 sand-cast relief by Costantino Nivola and especially Dan Flavin's ''the nominal three (to William of Ockham)'' strengthen the museum's spotty sculpture collection.

Geometric collages by Gertrude Greene and her husband, Balcomb Greene, and a pictographic drawing and screen print by Peter Busa enhance the holdings in American modernism. Among the many other noteworthy works on paper are Lawrence Weiner's ''Islands in the Storm'' suite and ''Marianne Moore's Hat,'' a signature mixed-media collage by Ray Johnson.